The ugly truth: Defeating ISIS will take decades

David Ignatius writes: Allies and adversaries see U.S. forces living in secure compounds, eating fancy chow and minimizing their exposure to potential terrorist assaults. The United States may say it’s fighting alongside its allies, but on the ground, it often looks different. Actually living and fighting alongside our partners in Iraq and Syria will be much more dangerous, but it may be the only way to build a solid alliance that can someday eradicate the extremists.

Contrast these stern admonitions from the commanders who have lived through the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts with the upbeat talk from political leaders. President Obama pledged that “priority number one is protecting the American people and going after terrorist networks” and then said a few moments later that these networks “do not threaten our national existence.” That sends a mixed message — one that Hillary Clinton has echoed in her campaign.

Republican rants about the Islamic State are even worse, in that they promise total victory without suggesting the level of commitment and sacrifice involved. The GOP responses sound tough, from Donald Trump’s “bomb the hell out of [the Islamic State]” to Sen. Marco Rubio’s (Fla.) assurance in last week’s debate that “the most powerful military in the world is going to destroy them.”

The next president is going to inherit an expanding war against a global terrorist adversary. The debate about how best to fight this enemy hasn’t even begun. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ‘takes control’ of Rmeilan airfield in Syria

Al Jazeera reports: US troops have taken control of Rmeilan airfield in Syria’s northern province of Hasakah to support Kurdish fighters against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) told Al Jazeera.

The airfield near the city of Rmeilan, which will become the first US-controlled airbase in Syria, was previously controlled by the US-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

The airfield is close to Syria’s borders with Iraq and Turkey.

“Under a deal with the YPG, the US was given control of the airport. The purpose of this deal is to back up the SDF, by providing weapons and an airbase for US warplanes,” Taj Kordsh, a media activist from the SDF told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

“This airport was previously controlled by the YPG for over two years now. This strategic airport is close to several oil bases – one of the biggest in this area. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s elite Guards to gain regional, economic power in post-sanctions era

Reuters reports: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards did well under international sanctions, and the elite military force is destined to become still richer now they’ve been lifted.

Iran’s clerical rulers have supported economic growth of the Guards, rewarding the group for sanctions-busting as well as suppressing dissent at home and helping Tehran’s allies abroad – notably Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Now the country is expecting an economic boom in the post-sanctions era and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), will be a beneficiary. Likewise, the leadership will ensure it is well funded to continue the effort in the regional crisis, including the Syrian civil war.

The Guards aren’t entirely off the hook, even though the United States, European Union and United Nations lifted most sanctions on Saturday under a deal with world powers where Tehran agreed to curbs on its nuclear program. [Continue reading…]

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Gates: Don’t expect the nuclear agreement to lead to a more moderate Iran

Business Insider reports: Former US defense secretary Robert Gates isn’t optimistic that the landmark July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran will lead the country to halt any of its disruptive policies in the Middle East or its support for terrorist groups.

In an interview with Business Insider, Gates, who spent nearly 27 years in the CIA and was the only cabinet secretary to have served under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, said that he didn’t believe the nuclear deal would have a moderating impact on Iranian behavior or lead Tehran to become a more responsible international actor.

“The notion that betting that this regime is going to temper its behavior in the region because of this nuclear deal I think is mistaken,” Gates told Business Insider. “I think that will not happen.” [Continue reading…]

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How the other 1% lives: Wealth gap not the only way in which global elite is taking advantage

By Anna Childs, The Open University

Oxfam’s latest report, focused on an increasingly obscene wealth inequality and the stranglehold exerted by a global elite, had one central message: The era of tax havens that have made this possible must be brought to an end.

The report – An Economy for the 1% – was timed as a call to action for influential delegates to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum taking place in Davos, Switzerland.

The headline numbers showed that the top 1% own as much wealth as the other 99% and – even more startling – that the richest 62 individuals own more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population (compared to 388 individuals in 2010). To put this into stark perspective, this group of 62 people own as much as the 3.6 billion people on the bottom of the heap.

Oxfam makes it clear that this distribution of wealth is not some incidental byproduct of rising worldwide prosperity. Since 2000, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while 50% of that has gone to the 1% of people on the top of the pile – about 74m people. While the richest have been getting richer, the combined wealth of the poorest half of the planet has fallen by US$1 trillion (41%) in the past five years alone.

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Oceans may contain more plastic debris than fish by 2050

The Washington Post reports: There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say. And if it was bagged up and arranged across all of the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.

But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the nonprofit foundation said in a report Tuesday.

According to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years, and it is expected to double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we’ll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014. [Continue reading…]

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The paradoxes that sit at the very core of physics

schrodingerscat

Margaret Wertheim writes: Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being.

But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension. When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern.

Physicists are deeply aware of the schizophrenic nature of their science and long to find a synthesis, or unification. Such is the goal of a so-called ‘theory of everything’. However, to non-physicists, these competing lines of thought, and the paradoxes they entrain, can seem not just bewildering but absurd. In my experience as a science writer, no other scientific discipline elicits such contradictory responses. [Continue reading…]

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UN reports nearly 19,000 Iraqi civilian deaths in 22 months

The New York Times reports: Nearly 19,000 Iraqi civilians have died and more than three million have fled their homes over a 22-month period marked by a “staggering” level of violence, the United Nations said on Tuesday, in a report that starkly demonstrated why huge numbers of Iraqis were seeking refuge in Europe.

Fighting between the Islamic State, Iraqi security forces and pro-government militias from the start of 2014 to the end of October 2015 left at least 18,802 civilians dead, the United Nations mission in Iraq said in a report compiled jointly with the organization’s human rights office in Geneva.

Nearly double that number of civilians has been wounded in the fighting, the report said, adding that officials had emphasized that the casualty estimates were a minimum.

“Even the obscene casualty figures fail to accurately reflect exactly how terribly civilians are suffering in Iraq,” the United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in a statement, which noted that “countless others” had died from the lack of access to food, water and medical care. [Continue reading…]

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The opening up of Iran will mean a return to barbarity as usual

Paul Mason writes: “This is a good day,” said Barack Obama, announcing the end of nuclear sanctions against Iran, “because, once again, we’re seeing what’s possible with strong American diplomacy.” The deal, accompanied by a prisoner swap and the release of frozen Iranian funds, signals the end of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But it is not a triumph of “strong American diplomacy”. It is testimony to America’s weakness and incoherence, in the very region where it has concentrated its military and diplomatic force for decades. As for Iran, with the nuclear programme gone, and its iconic American prisoners released, normal levels of barbarity can now be resumed.

First, there is the ordinary repression: convicts – two-thirds of them drug dealers or drug users according to the UN – were being executed at the rate of three per day last year, the highest per-capita execution rate in the world. Then there’s the suppression of trade unions. Iran arrested 233 labour activists in the year to May 2015. All strikes and labour agitation are treated as threats to national security by the Revolutionary Guards, the hardline military force that enforces Islamic discipline at home while spearheading military operations abroad. Finally, there is the outright political repression that has left two presidential candidates from the “green” protests of 2009 – Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi – under house arrest, and hundreds of other human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and scientists detained.

As western businesses rub their hands at the prospect of renewed access to this market of 78 million consumers, it’s worth remembering what the purpose of all this repression is. Industry is militarised: huge swathes of the economy are owned by the Revolutionary Guards themselves. With their front companies de-listed and given new access to the international bank clearing system, many of the Guards’ leaders will now get very rich. The workforce, deprived of all basic rights to organise, their jobs totally precarious, and with 70% earning less than the official poverty level, will get the chance to be exploited by global capital, not just the Guards, the mullahs and their cronies.

You could lament all of the repression, yet still celebrate the Iran deal as a diplomatic achievement and de-escalation of conflict, if Washington was demonstrating any sign of a coherent regional policy. But it is not.

On the same day Obama lifted nuclear sanctions, he imposed a whole new set of sanctions on Iran for testing a long-range missile. At the same moment, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, was fighting alongside its ally President Assad in Syria – against both Islamic State and the moderate opposition backed by America. Soldiers from Iran’s Quds force continue to prop up the Shia dominated government in Iraq. And the west’s regional ally, Saudi Arabia, continues to escalate its standoff with Iran after failing to scupper the nuclear deal by executing a Shia cleric.

If your brain is struggling to impose coherence on this picture of half-alliances, provocations and incessant death, that is no accident. Even those with intricate knowledge of the region cannot fathom what the Obama administration is trying to achieve. [Continue reading…]

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What binds Trump supporters together?

Matthew MacWilliams writes: If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you say? They’re white? They’re poor? They’re uneducated?

You’d be wrong.

In fact, I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump — and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.

That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: A New York Times/CBS News poll last week showed Mr. Trump, a Presbyterian, dominating the field with 42 percent of evangelical voters; Mr. Cruz was second with 25 percent.

In dozens of interviews with evangelical voters in 16 states, from every region of the country outside the Northeast, those supporting Mr. Trump sounded a familiar refrain: that his heart was in the right place, that his intentions for the country were pure, that he alone was capable of delivering to a troubled country salvation in the here and now.

“He is the only one who can pull us back from the abyss,” said John Juvenal, 67, a lifelong Republican and retired police officer from Oklahoma City. [Continue reading…]

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The color of surveillance

Alvaro Bedoya writes: Every day, we hear about the power and promise of pervasive surveillance. We are losing sight of its victims. Instead, an NSA debate that could have surfaced a long line of black, Latino, Asian, and Muslim victims of surveillance was cast as an argument between the U.S. military and Snowden — national security versus the hackers.

This narrow focus may have blinded Congress to a little known but especially troubling aspect of the NSA scandal. In June 2013, the headlines were that the NSA was logging everyone’s phone calls. We now know that the NSA’s call records program — the single largest domestic spying program in our nation’s history — was effectively beta-tested for almost a decade on American immigrants.

In 1992, the Drug Enforcement Administration began a call records program that’s considered the blueprint for the NSA’s program, which began after Sept. 11 and received court approval in 2006. The DEA program logged virtually all calls made from the United States to a list of countries, regardless of who made them or why. Over time, 116 countries were added to that list — including Mexico and most of Central and South America. This means that for almost a decade before the NSA call records program, countless immigrants’ calls were tracked by the DEA when they called home. This is particularly true for Hispanic immigrants, who make up a large part of what is now the largest minority group in the country. We do not know what transpired in Congress’ closed-door discussions about the NSA or DEA call records programs, but public debates largely ignored these facts.

The next NSA debate will peak at the end of 2017. That’s the expiration date of another surveillance law that allows the government to read — without a warrant — certain messages stored on companies’ U.S. servers where at least one party to the communication was a foreigner living abroad. Will Congress probe the likely disparate impact of this law? If not, when will Congress reckon with the color of surveillance? [Continue reading…]

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Migrant communities think more like non-migrants after just one generation, study suggests

By Alex Mesoudi, University of Exeter and Kesson Magid, Durham University

A common fear among the general public in many Western countries is that immigrants have ways of thinking or social values that are fundamentally different to them, and that these differences prevent them from integrating into Western societies.

Our new research, published in PLOS ONE, suggests such fears are misplaced.

We found that British Bangladeshi migrants in East London shifted towards the thinking styles of the wider non-migrant population in just a single generation. Our study also provides insights into how and why people from different parts of the world think and reason differently.

We were motivated by recent findings in the field of “cultural psychology” that show striking variations between cultures in what had long been assumed to be universal ways of thinking and reasoning.

Here’s an example. In the 1990s, Nick Leeson infamously made unauthorised speculative trades that eventually brought down Barings Bank, Britain’s oldest merchant bank. How would you explain Leeson’s actions? Cultural psychologists have found variations between cultures in how people answer this question.

People from the West, it is suggested, would typically say that Leeson was greedy or dishonest. Psychologists call these “dispositional” explanations, which involve intrinsic aspects of people’s personality or character.

But people from East Asia might explain Leeson’s actions as resulting from a corrosive banking system that lacks proper checks, and which values profits above all else. These are typical “situational explanations”, which refer to the external situation or context.

In 2010, the psychologists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan collected many examples of cultural variation like this, including variation in whether people punish cheats, what people consider to be moral and immoral, reactions to aggression, and susceptibility to perceptual illusions.

They coined the acronym WEIRD to describe people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic countries. While the vast majority of psychology experiments are conducted on WEIRD people, they are far from representative of our species as a whole.

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UN knew for months that Syrians were starving in Madaya under Hezbollah siege

Roy Gutman writes: Until the beginning of this month, Madaya was an obscure town in southwestern Syria, overshadowed by nearby Zabadani, where opposition rebels had fought a fierce battle against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and more recently Hezbollah. But today, as international relief convoys arrive with food and medicine to lift a starvation siege, Madaya has become the focal point of Syrian aid workers’ anger at the United Nations, who accuse the international body of giving higher priority to its relationship with Damascus than to the fate of Madaya’s beleaguered residents.

Madaya was the worst off of all the besieged towns in Syria, relief workers say. As early as October, locals in the town had been raising alarms about the dire humanitarian situation there. At least six children and 17 adults starved to death in December, and hundreds more risked starvation.

U.N. officials knew this — but until shocking images of starving infants started circulating and news media sounded the alarm, it remained silent, reserving alarm for an unpublished internal memo.

The “Flash Update” issued on Jan. 6 by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which negotiates aid deliveries, spoke of “desperate conditions,” including “severe malnutrition reported across the community,” and said there was an “urgent need” for humanitarian assistance. In October, community leaders reported some 1,000 cases of malnutrition in children under the age of 1, it said.

But the general public could not have known this, because OCHA classified the bulletin as “Internal, Not for Quotation.” OCHA had no immediate comment on why the update, leaked to Foreign Policy, wasn’t published.

The U.N.’s months-long silence on the starvation in Madaya is one of the reasons for the disquiet roiling the community of international and Syrian relief officials. Another is its oft-repeated claim that no one siege is that important but that all should be lifted, a goal that appears beyond reach. When Yacoub el-Hillo, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Syria, addressed reporters on Jan. 12, a day after leading the first convoy into the town, he described Madaya residents as “a people that are desperate; a people that are cold; a people that are hungry; a people that have almost lost hope” — but he blamed no one in particular for this state of affairs and made no mention of the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah, which in fact is maintaining the siege against Syrian civilians in Madaya.

Instead, he swung into a familiar U.N. litany: The siege of rebel-held Madaya was just like the sieges mounted by the Islamic State or Syrian rebels against government-held regions. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS cuts fighters’ salaries in half as group suffers crippling blows

Vocativ reports: ISIS fighters aren’t getting any year-end pay raises this January. In fact, in response to mounting military and economic pressure across Syria and Iraq, the terror group is slashing salaries, newly leaked ISIS documents show.

The administrative records reveal that ISIS leaders in Raqqa, the group’s de-facto capital in Syria, reduced the monthly salaries of all fighters by half sometime around November or December of last year, just as the U.S. began to dramatically increase its airstrikes against ISIS-held oil fields and other financial targets.

“On account of the exceptional circumstances the Islamic State is facing, it has been decided to reduce the salaries that are paid to all mujahideen by half,” reads the official notice, which was translated and first published by Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an ISIS expert and fellow at the Middle East Forum. “It is not allowed for anyone to be exempted from this decision, whatever his position.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is leading Turkey’s AK Party into a trap

While reviewing a recent ISIS propaganda video, “Turkey and the Fire of Racism,” Hilmi Demir writes: [ISIS] presents itself as a force for correcting nationalism and returning humanity to the natural flow of its history. In this sense, it is not unlike Communism, which advertised a humane post-capitalist utopia. In the video, scenes displaying nationalism, such as Hitler’s Germany, Nasser’s Egypt and Atatürk’s Turkey have an industrial feel to them, often from old newsreels or deliberately distorted images. In contrast, ISIL militants talking into the camera invariably sit against a background of greenery — trees or shrubbery. Before the militants speak, the camera shows cuts of children playing, and birds gliding over a pristine pond. The underlying message is that ISIL is the only polity in the world in sync with God’s creation.

A part of the video features a militant speaking in Kurdish (with Turkish and Arabic subtitles), in an appeal to “Muslim Kurds, especially those living in Turkey.” ISIL here is seeking to establish its credentials as a post-racial society. Addressing the Marxist-Leninist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the militant asks, “Do you believe that your salvation will come from the hands of atheists [the PKK and its backers]?” He continues, “Under the shadow of Sharia, the only thing separating Arab and non-Arab alike is their piety,” he says. In its own way, ISIL is making a progressive claim. Unlike Turkey, which it sees as being dominated by a single “tribe,” everyone in ISIL territory is equal under its law.

International observers who accuse the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) of aiding ISIL might be surprised that the video takes the longtime Islamist government into its crosshairs. The AK Party, according to the video, clothes itself in Islamist rhetoric while acting as the “Crusaders’ hand of tyranny in the region.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is specifically labeled an apostate who perpetuates the secular agenda of Turkey’s foundation. [Continue reading…]

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Jailed Turkish editor slams EU deal with Erdoğan’s ‘fascist government’

The Guardian reports: The editor of Turkey’s most influential dissident newspaper has said in an interview from his prison cell that the country’s ongoing crackdown on journalists is the worst in its history and that he was imprisoned for doing his job.

Can Dündar, the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, also said the EU was betraying its democratic values by seeking a rapprochement with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in the hope that he would stem the flow of refugees into Europe while ignoring human rights violations.

“We always looked at the European Union as an anchor, a model to raise the standard of democracy in Turkey to universal levels, not as leverage to dictatorships,” he said. “Now, if the EU, in order to stop the influx of refugees by turning our lands into a big concentration camp, agrees to turn a blind eye while Erdoğan spurns democracy, human rights, freedom of press and rule of law, it means that the EU is discarding its founding principles in order to protect its short-term interests.” [Continue reading…]

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Bill McKibben: The real zombie apocalypse

Here we are just a couple of weeks into 2016 and we already know that last year was the second-warmest on record in the continental United States (the winner so far being 2012); the month of December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation; and it’s assumed that, when the final figures come in later this month, 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Even before this news is confirmed, we know that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century which, at least to me, looks ominously like a pattern. And early expectations are that this year will top last, with the help of a continuing monster El Niño event in the overheating waters of the Pacific that has only added to the impact of global warming and to fierce weather around the world. Everywhere it seems increasingly possible to see the signs of climate change: the melting Arctic; the destabilizing ice sheets in both the Antarctic and Greenland; the already rising sea levels that are someday destined to submerge major coastal cities; the disappearing glaciers (and so, in some regions, endangered water supplies); monster typhoons; severe droughts; and the burning that goes with a globally expanding fire season; the — in a word — extremity of it all.

With 2015 in the history books, it’s easy enough to think of our changing weather as part of that history, but that would be a mistake. Climate change, if allowed to come to full fruition, will be something else altogether — not history, but the possible end of it. History, after all, is something we’re generally familiar with. It has its surprises, but the rise and fall of nations, of empires, even of civilizations, the coming of democracy or dictators, the rising of peoples, the failure of revolutions, and yet more autocrats, all of that is the normal course of human events. All of it is part of the ongoing record. Climate change is something else entirely. Certainly, it emerges from history, since through our industrial processes — the burning of coal and oil — we created it, however inadvertently (at first). But let’s face it: global warming is the potential deal-breaker for history. It threatens not just to submerge global cities, but to sink civilization itself.

Don’t think of it as a tragedy for the planet. Give Earth a few million years and it’ll do fine. If climate change does its worst, life, in some fashion, possibly even human life, will undoubtedly survive and someday once again flourish, but the environment in which our civilizations have been built and our modest history recorded, the welcoming planet we’ve known will cease to exist in any time span that is meaningful to us. That is the future reality we face in the grim zombie world of the giant energy companies and energy states that Bill McKibben describes today. It’s why organizations like the one he founded, 350.org, are so important to our future and to the literal preservation of history. Unless we ensure that the human future is powered by alternative energy, and do so relatively quickly, while keeping the preponderance of fossil fuels in the ground, we will indeed find ourselves out of history and in the midst of a climate-change version of a zombie apocalypse. Tom Engelhardt

Night of the living dead, climate change-style
How to stop the fossil fuel industry from wrecking our world
By Bill McKibben

When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to kill something off — if it wanted to keep going.

Something similar is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry. Even as the global warming crisis makes it clear that coal, natural gas, and oil are yesterday’s energy, the momentum of two centuries of fossil fuel development means new projects keep emerging in a zombie-like fashion.

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